ReClaim Uses AI Visual Search to Modernize Campus Lost-and-Found Systems

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ReClaim is a new campus-focused lost-and-found platform that replaces vague text descriptions with AI-powered visual search. Users upload photos of lost or found items, which are processed through a CLIP vision model to generate 512-dimensional image embeddings capturing shape, color, and texture. The system then compares these embeddings using cosine similarity, surfacing matches that exceed a 90% similarity threshold. Built with Next.js, FastAPI, PyTorch, and Firestore, the platform enforces standardized 3:4 image crops to improve model consistency. A key design feature is campus-level isolation, meaning searches are scoped to a single institution rather than a global database.

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